On August 14, after repeated delays, the Israeli security cabinet finally held a special meeting to review the country's preparedness for unconventional warfare. It decided to vaccinate 15,000 "first response" personnel against smallpox, as a first stage of a general vaccination campaign against a possible bio-weapons attack originating in Iraq or carried out by Saddam's Palestinian proxies.

Israel's security and police authorities are keeping their aces well covered even after publicizing their coup on Wednesday, August 21. Saturday night, August 16, they captured a six- man cell of Jerusalemite Arabs, all bearing Israeli identity cards, who admit to complicity in executing 8 of the most devastating terrorist attacks in the last three months, in which 35 Israelis died and dozens were gravely wounded in different parts of the country.

Abu Nidal - once Yasser Arafat's best friend; later turned fierce foe - was shot dead early Friday, August 16 by gunmen who burst into his home in Baghdad. debkafile's intelligence and counter-terror experts have no doubt that the ailing 65-year old terrorist was murdered by Iraqi military intelligence.

Israel's defense minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer may have started out with a small plan to do down Haim Ramon, his rival for the Labor party leadership, and perhaps steal the Likud prime minister Ariel Sharon's limelight. He has ended up writing a powerful recipe for Yasser Arafat's re-accreditation at a time of surging Palestinian terrorism.

The Palestinian terrorist machine molded by Yasser Arafat executed seven terror attacks against Israelis in a single day, no doubt achieving a gruesome world record. Eleven people died - soldiers and civilians, Jews, Arabs, Druzes and two Filipina women. Close to 100 were injured; many will remain invalids. The question on every lip at the end of this black day is this: What is Sharon waiting for? All the Palestinian groups, buoyed up by what is seen as Ariel Sharon's slack responses, have joined forces for yet another a mighty effort to beat the Israelis - and most of all their armed forces - into the ground.

Various politicians lost no time in capitalizing on the genuine shock, condemnation and remorse in Israel and overseas over the death of children and civilians in Monday's Israeli F16 warplane bombing of a residential district of Gaza City. More than one previous attempt to hit the Hamas's top gun, Salah Shehada, was put off when he was found to be in civilian company. The Israeli army admitted that it erred in not calling off the F16 strike too, but stressed that Shehada, founder and commander of the Hamas's suicidal Ezz-e-din al-Qassam, had knowingly cut short the lives of many Palestinian youths by sending them on suicidal homicide missions against Israeli children, as a matter of policy. Shortly before he was cut down, he began passing directives from Gaza to the West Bank, to initiate a fresh wave of suicide killings.

The expert ambush laid for the Bnei Brak-Immanuel bus 189 Tuesday, July 16, left seven Israelis dead. Eight of the 16 injured are fighting for their lives. The hospital had to deliver a badly hurt pregnant woman of a premature baby by Caesarian incision, in an attempt to save both lives.

The dozens of Hizballah operatives, members of the notorious Imad Mughniyeh's security and intelligence networks, who have infiltrated the West Bank and Gaza Strip since late last year, significantly enhanced the capabilities of the Palestinian terrorist networks.

Hesham Mohamed Hadayat was no stranger toEl Al's Los Angeles airport office. According to debkafile's counter-terror sources, the man who murdered two Israelis on the El Al ticket line at Los Angeles airport on July 4th worked for the American Mercury ground service company from 1993 (one year after he arrived in the US) until 1998, when he left to set up his own limousine service for air passengers.

Accelerated diplomatic momentum is in the air, along with the apparent slowdown of Palestinian suicidal terrorist action against Israel. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's two senior envoys, his political adviser Osama el Baz and intelligence chief Gen. Omar Suleiman, arrive Sunday, July 7, for talks in Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Hashem Mohamed Hadayat, 41, who gunned down Yakov Aminov, 46, and Vicky Hen, 25 - both from Los Angeles - on the 4th of July at the El Al terminal of Los Angeles, and wounded 7 others, is revealed by debkafile's intelligence and counter-terror sources as a Muslim extremist.

The surprise resignation of retired Army General Wayne A. Downing as deputy national security adviser to the president for combating terrorism, on Thursday, June 27, is bad news for the road ahead of America's war on terror, according to debkafile's intelligence sources.

Israeli troops rolled into Jenin, Nablus, Qalkilya, and Hebron Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, June 18-19, in retaliation for a terror attack that was shocking even by the standards of the continually escalating cycle of Palestinian suicide massacres of Israeli civilians. Eighteen commuters and the bus driver died, and more than fifty were injured when, in Tuesday morning's rush hour, 22-year old Mohammed al-Ghoul from the West Bank refugee camp of Al-Faraa, detonated a huge bomb packed with ball-bearings and sharp nails in the 32A bus at the busy Pat junction of south Jerusalem.

In a lengthy speech to West Point graduates Sunday, President George W. Bush articulated a shift in his war on global terror. The familiar threats to "rout them out" or "find them wherever they are" were replaced for the first time by a warning to Americans "to be ready for pre-emptive action to defend our liberty and to defend our lives". Warning of the continuing danger, he said, "We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt its plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge."

The word is out in the United States: Al-Qaeda, Hizballah and the Egyptian and Palestinian Islamic Jihad groups are about to strike.US intelligence has been leaking information, based on fragmentary intercepts of terrorist transmissions, of impending mass-casualty attacks in the United States, Europe and the Arabian Peninsula, including the Persian Gulf.

Three separate episodes over two decades, presented here for the first time by the intelligence and terrorism experts of debkafile and DEBKA-Net-Weekly, demonstrate that the malaise afflicting US intelligence is long-standing.

The most striking living proof that American double agents can be planted in the al Qaeda terror network is not to be found in Guantanamo or in East Afghanistan, which US, Australia, Norwegian, New Zealand and British Royal Marine troops are currently scouring for al Qaeda and Taliban pockets. That proof is to be found in Manhattan, not far from the ruins of the WorldTradeCenter, in a cell of a jail that also holds Ramzi Yousuf and the Blind Sheikh Rahman referred to by Condoleezza Rice.

On January 8, 1998, 33 months before the September 11 disasters, Islamic fundamentalist Ramzi Yousuf was sentenced by a Manhattan court to 240 years solitary confinement, a $4.5 m fine and $250 m in restitution for perpetrating the first terrorist attack on New York's WorldTradeCenter in February 1993.

The deal that turned Yasser Arafat loose from his besieged and battered Ramallah compound on May 1 entailed his surrendering six Palestinian terrorists and killers wanted by Israel, to be imprisoned in Jericho under American-Anglo custody.

Saturday night, May 11, debkafile was informed by its American and European sources of an explicit policy departure by the European Union: Following the Bethlehem episode, that ended in the banishment of 13 senior terrorists outside the Middle East, the deportation of 26 to the Gaza Strip and the release of another 84, Brussels has decided to come out in the open and fight the Bush administration's moves to sideline Yasser Arafat.